Our mentorship program matches healthy communities projects with a small group of experts who can provide technical assistance. Over the 6-month mentorship, the teams meet once a month and projects receive in-depth guidance and feedback to make their work more successful. The mentors work with the project team to understand and clarify the needs and what they want to accomplish. The mentors and project team jointly develop and implement a plan for providing the needed technical assistance.

Currently our mentorship program is in a pilot phase, which we will evaluate in early 2017. We hope to improve and expand our mentorship offerings in 2017. Subscribe to our newsletter if you’d like to be notified when announce future mentorship opportunities.

We created the mentorship program to provide technical assistance to individuals and organizations doing healthy communities work across the state. In almost all communities, there are dedicated individuals representing a variety of sectors who understand their communities and the need to collaborate with other sectors to make their communities better places to live, but face a variety of challenges, including: limited skills in working in a collaborative practice, limited relationships with individuals working in other sectors, lack of resources and understanding how existing resources might be accessed for a project. We believe that with technical assistance to address these issues, collaborations can be established, projects developed, and communities can thrive.

The mentorship program was first launched in the summer of 2016 and the Partnership has plans to continue to expand our mentorship offerings in 2017.